contemplating the intersection of work, the global economy, and Christian mission

Oct 26, 2017

Alongside life expectancy, a second measure of prosperity demographers frequently use is the child mortality rate. The child mortality rate is the number of children that die between birth and their fifth birthday, per 1,000 live births. Because the first years of life are when human beings are most vulnerable, their ability to survive the first years of life says a lot about the state of their society; thus the significance of the child mortality rate.

So what can we say about this measure of prosperity throughout human history? Here are estimates of the infant mortality rate (deaths by age one) typical of social scientists and economists who study these issues:

In the year 1000, the average infant could expect to live about 24 years. A third died in the first year of life. Hunger and epidemic disease ravaged the survivors. By 1820, life expectation had risen to 36 years in the west, with only marginal improvement elsewhere. (Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD, 69)

Before industrialization, at least one out of every five children died before reaching his or her first birth day; that is infant mortality measured as the number of children dying before the age of one, typically exceeded 200 per 1,000 live births. … In the United States, as late as 1900, infant mortality was 160; …” (Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, 27)

Estimates are that child mortality were over 40% prior to 1800.

Let's look at the change in the child morality rate for the last 200 years:

Globally, that is drop from 40 children per 1,000 to 4 children per 1,000. This graphic compares various nations at 1800, 1950, 1990, and 2013.

Note that the 2013 child mortality rate for all but a few small lagging countries is lower than the rate for all but a few of the wealthiest countries in 1950. The worst country in 2013 has a rate half that of the best country in 1800.

This is not to say that every nation, or every region within a nation, or every subgroup within in a nation, have prospered equally well. Still, there is dramatic improvement in all regions of the world.

During the 1990s, there was a small increase in the rate for the former Soviet nations but that trend has turned positive again. There are disparities between Anglos and non-Anglos in the United States. The African AIDS epidemic has been harmful. Other regions face other challenges. Yet the overall trend is dramatically downward.

Using child mortality as measures of prosperity, the world is far more prosperous than it has ever been and the gap is narrowing between the top and bottom rungs of the global social ladder. Again, most of this change has occurred over a time when the total world population grew sixfold, from less than 1 billion in 1800 to about 6.6 billion today!

So as we look at the trajectory of change in the world, we find an unprecedented rise in prosperity. It is uneven improvement but every corner of the planet has improved and the gap between top and bottom nations is closing.

Oct 23, 2017

Demographers commonly use life expectancy rates as a measure of societal well-being. Life expectancy is the number of years someone is expected to live at the time they are born based on actuarial science. Long life is a universal indicator of prosperity across cultures and time. It is an important measure to demographers because achieving it requires a complex mix of variables, like a sustained nutritious food supply, a sanitary and safe environment, relatively little disease, absence of war, and a stable society.

So what can we say about this measure of prosperity throughout human history? Here are estimates of two social scientists and economists typical of those who study these issues:

For most of its existence, homo sapiens lived in far-flung hunter-and-gathering communities, each of which was quite small and barely able to reproduce itself. Life expectancy at birth was hardly twenty-five years on average, and those persons who survived childhood often died violently, in combat with other hunters, at relatively young ages. (Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, 48)

For much of human history, average life expectancy used to be 20-30 years. By 1900, it had climbed to about 31 years … By 2003 it was 66.8 years. (Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, 31)

To put the last statement by Goklany in perspective lets graph the estimated life expectancy on a chart:

If we show only the last 250 years we get a clearer picture of what has happened:

Using life expectancy as a measure of prosperity, the world is far more prosperous than it has ever been. The gap is narrowing between the top and bottomof the global community. More amazing, most of this change occurred over a time when the total world population grew sixfold, from less than 1 billion in 1800 to about 6.6 billion today!

This is not to say that every nation, or every region within a nation, or every subgroup within in a nation, has prospered equally well. AIDS has been devastating in regions of Africa. War and discord has harmed some nations. Yet over the past forty years, we see broad improvement in the world. Keep in mind that the global population nearly doubled during this time:

Oct 19, 2017

Is the state of world getting better or getting worse? How would you answer that question? What indicators would you use?

For Christians, our mission is to seek the greatest shalom possible in the world, always cognizant that shalom in its fullness will only be recognized at the consummation of the new creation. But how would we measure shalom?

Isaiah 65:17-25 is a statement of what the ancient Hebrews understood to be the fullness of shalom.

17 For I am about to create new heavensand a new earth;the former things shall not be rememberedor come to mind.18 But be glad and rejoice foreverin what I am creating;for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,and its people as a delight.19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem,and delight in my people;no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,or the cry of distress.20 No more shall there be in itan infant that lives but a few days,or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.21 They shall build houses and inhabit them;they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.22 They shall not build and another inhabit;they shall not plant and another eat;for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.23 They shall not labor in vain,or bear children for calamity;for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD --and their descendants as well.24 Before they call I will answer,while they are yet speaking I will hear.25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,the lion shall eat straw like the ox;but the serpent -- its food shall be dust!They shall not hurt or destroyon all my holy mountain, (NRSV)

Several themes jump out from this characterization of a world restored to shalom. There are some very practical and specific features:

God will delight in his people and be attentive to them. (18-19, 24)

Safety will prevail. (19)

Infant mortality will cease. (20)

Life expectancy will increase beyond 100 years. (20)

There will be a just and prosperous order in society (absence of war and oppression.) (21-24)

Nature itself will be altered into a more peaceful order. (25)

The New Testament version of the new creation expands this vision even further. In the New Testament, God makes his dwelling with humankind and there is eternal life. But it seems to me that if we look at the features of shalom in this Isaiah, we can get a good sense of whether or not the world is moving in the right direction.

Especially interesting about this Isaiah passage is the direct reference to infant mortality rates and life expectancy. Social scientists frequently turn to these measures for an overall sense of societal welfare. Why? These two indicators serve as indirect indicators of other societal realities. Many other social variables (i.e., adequate food, health care, environment, social stability, healthy social institutions, low crime) must be positive in order for these two variables to be positive as well.

What is particularly interesting is that every time I hear sermons on this passage, the emphasis is on the declining state of shalom in our world. One sermon I heard a few years back lamented rising inequality, AIDS, poverty in Africa, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and polar bears drowning due to melting ice (the last one was in the prayer of confession.) In my Presbyterian tradition, the prayers of confession frequently include lament of our greed and threatened destruction of the plant. I routinely read theologians on social media who decry "neoliberalism" and the deepening dystopia into which it is leading our planet. Public theologian Brian McLaren characterizes the present world order as a “suicide machine.” Is this an accurate assessment?

The most common trait I find in these assessments is that they are usually thoroughly subjective. They are without context and without awareness of empirical realities. Do not misread me here. I am not saying we are without need of confession. Evil is at work in the world and within us. But what if we collectively found a way to double life expectancy, make infant mortality rare, virtually eliminate extreme poverty, reduce global income inequality, and radically reduce the number of deaths due to war. Would we not celebrate? Yes. The historically reality is that all things have happened or are on the way to happening! Yet I do not believe I have ever heard a sermon extolling and celebrating the profound and unprecedented improvements we have seen in global well-being.

I want to offer some thoughts on how we might measure shalom, at least from the perspective of physical and material well-being. I'll write several posts in the coming days that look at key indicators. As you will see, my conclusion is that are we are living in an era of unprecedented expansion of global shalom.

That is in not say we are at some Francis Fukuyama-like “End of History” moment, but the idea that global well-being is in decline is indefensible. Unprecedented positive change is underway and has been for some time. Yet there are still more than billion barely touched by these world events. There is so much more that needs to happen. We have learned a great deal and need to learn a great deal more. In my estimation, the biggest threats to continuation of these advances are radical populist movements from the right and left, disconnected from facts and history. We need to be informed about the true state of the world before we go about joining movements to "fix" it. We need to lift up achievements as morale builders and learn lessons from successes as we press ahead on the journey.

Apr 18, 2017

Alice Dreger's "Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science," is one of the most refreshing books I have read recently. Dreger is a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Nearly twenty years ago, Dreger became an activist for the rights of intersex persons. She fought to change the prevailing practice of surgically altering babies to "rectify" ambiguous genitalia, a practice that science suggested was too risky relative to the outcomes and raised a great many ethical questions. Motivated by varying convictions, surgeons were ignoring science. But before long, Dreger found herself advocating for scientists against activists on another intersex issue. The activists ignored science and attacked scientists when research potentially contradicted activists' strongly held convictions. This book is Dreger's reflections on what she learned from these experiences. I expect to publish a review of the book shortly. For now, I want to post three power sections from the book. (All emphases in the original.)

This quote comes as she is reflecting on her experience talking with researchers at the University of Missouri who had been targeted because of controversial research findings

The story I had been told about Mike Bailey and Craig Palmer and so many other white straight male scientists accused of producing bad and dangerous findings, the story I had willingly heard as an academic feminist in the humanities, was that these guys were just soldiers of the oppressive establishment against which we good guys had come to fight. They came from old dogma about human nature; we came from progress and social justice, and we had to win. But here I was faced with the fact that not only were these scientists politically progressive when it came to things like the rights of transgender people and rape victims, they were also willing to look for facts that might get them in hot water. They very much cared about progress in social justice, but they cared first about know what was true.

That didn’t mean that these scientists (or I, or anyone else) existed without bias. It didn’t mean their work wasn’t shaped and sometimes tainted by politics, ideologies, and loyalties. But it did mean they tried to adhere to an intellectual agenda that wasn’t first and only political. They believed that good science couldn’t be done by just Ouija-boarding your answers. Good scholarship had to put the search for truth first and the quest for social justice second.

In Missouri [University of Missouri, Columbia], I realized that there’s a practical reason for this order: Sustainable justice couldn’t be achieved if we didn’t know what’s true about the world. (You can’t effectively prosecute and prevent rape if you don’t understand why, where, and how rape happens.) But there was also a more essential reason for putting the quest for truth first: it was who we scholars were supposed to be. As the little prop plane flew from Columbia, Missouri, toward the sunrise, of this I was sure: We scholars had to put the search for evidence before everything else, even when the evidence pointed to facts we did not want to see. The world needed that from us, to maintain – by our example, by our very existence – a world that would keep learning and questioning, that would remain free in thought, inquiry, and word.

Nevertheless I knew many of my colleagues in the humanities would disagree. I could practically hear them arguing against me, as if they were seated all around me in those cramped fake-leather seats, yelling to be heard above the churning propellers. We have to use our privilege to advance the rights of the marginalized. We can’t let people like Bailey and Palmer say what is true about the world. We have to give voice and power to the oppressed and let them say what is true. Science is as biased as all human endeavors, and so we have to empower the disempowered, and speak always with them.

Involuntarily shaking my head, I argued back: “Justice cannot be determined merely by social position. Justice cannot be advanced by letting ‘truth’ be determined by political goals. Only people like us, with insane amounts of privilege, could ever think it was a good idea to decide what is right before we even know what it true. Only insanely privileged people like us, who never fear the knock of a corrupt police, could think guilt or innocence should be determined by identity rather than facts. It isn’t perfect, but look what it has gotten us: antibiotics, an explanation and a treatment for AIDS, reliable histories of the Holocaust, DNA-based exonerations of those falsely accused of crimes, spaceships on the surface of Mars – hell, the plane we’re flying in now.

Where would we be, I wondered, if the pope had ultimately won out over Galileo, if he succeeded in using his self-serving Catholic identity politics to forever quash Galileo’s evidence that the ancients and the Bible were wrong about the Earth? Power plays as morality plays, whether by popes or feminists, are just that – plays. I longed for the real world, longed to pick apart each history to know what’s true, to have my work judged by others, to find evidence that an idea is right or wrong. (136-138)

This passage comes from the end of the last chapter.

I want to say to activists: If you want justice, support the search for truth. Engage in searches for the truth. If you really want meaningful progress and not just temporary self-righteousness, carpe datum. You can begin with principles, yes, but to pursue a principle effectively, you have to know if your route will lead to your destination. If you must criticize scholars whose work challenges yours, do so on the evidence, not by poisoning the land on which we all live.

To scholars I want to say more: Our fellow human beings can’t afford to have us act like cattle in an industrial farming system. If we take seriously the importance of truth to justice and recognize the many forces now acting against the pursuit of knowledge – if we really get why our role in democracy is like no other – then we really ought to feel that we must do more to protect each other and the public from misinformation and disinformation. Doing so means taking on more responsibility to police ourselves and everybody else for accuracy and great objectivity – taking on with renewed vigor the pursuit of accurate knowledge and putting ourselves second to that pursuit.

I know that a lot of people who met me along the way in this work thought I’d end up on one side of the war between activists and scholars. The deeper I went, however, the more obvious it became that the best activists and the best scholars actually long for the same kind of world – a free one.

Here’s the one thing I now know for sure after this every long trip: Evidence really is an ethical issue, the most important ethical issue in a modern democracy. If you want justice, you must work for truth. And if you want to work for truth, you must do a little more than wish for justice. (261-262)

These two paragraphs are near the end of the epilogue.

The problem is an old one: People don’t really get that good intentions can’t save you from hell. So long as we believe that bad acts are committed only by evil people and that good people do only good, we will fail to see, believe, or prevent these kinds of travesties. Nowadays I feel as though 90 percent of my time talking to academics and activists is spent trying to convince them of this: The people who are against you are not necessarily evil, and your own acts are not necessarily good. That’s why we still need scholars and activists. It’s not easy to see what’s what in the heat of the moment, and we need people pushing for the truth and justice if we’re going to get both right.

But most people I run into aren’t like us humans. Most people I meet seem convinced that the goodness of their souls will keep them from committing bad acts. When they look back at history, they don’t see what we historians see – dumb tragedies. They see simple moral dramas, with predictable characters enacting easy stories of good and evil. They don’t understand that the Nazis probably didn’t think they were “Nazis.” (275-276)

Mar 09, 2017

Ben Carson touched off a firestorm this week when he referred to slaves as immigrants. (Barak Obama has done the same several times.) The uproar has been that equating slavery and immigration minimizes the horrors of slavery. I have engaged in a number of social media discussions on this topic. At the crux of the matter is volition. Are people brought to a place against their will immigrants? Merriam Webster Dictionary:

Immigrant - “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.”

Volition is not part of the definition. As any demographer will tell you, populations grow (or decline) via three factors: births, deaths, and migration. When looking at a particular locale, people who come to that locale are immigrants. People who go from that locale to another are emigrants. Births and immigration grow the population. Deaths and emigration shrink it. It is a closed system. Volition is not part of the equation.

I am in agreement with concerns about minimizing slavery and I worry that statements by Carson and Obama risk doing that. As Jemar Tisby writes, a generous reading of Carson’s characterization is that “African slaves endured unimaginable hardship to carve out a life for themselves and their descendants.” I think that was indeed the intent but it is challenging. Framing slaves as rough equivalents of people who bought a ticket on a boat to come to America in search of a better life minimizes slavery. Both were immigrants but with very very different stories. The desire to present African-Americans as other than simply victims while embracing the horrors of slavery is a tough needle to thread in the space of a few words as both these men were trying to do.

Mar 01, 2017

Our study made the first known attempt to combine these various costs and benefits into one analysis to estimate what recycling rate is best. Our conclusion was that recycling up to 10% appears to reduce social costs, but any recycling over 10% costs the environment and the economy more than it helps. The environment and economy suffer as we transport some recycled materials to destinations as far afield as China.

These provocative results certainly require confirmation from future independent and objective research before broad policy goals can be adjusted. Also, many of the benefit and costs associated with waste disposal and recycling vary across regions of the country and world, and thus optimal recycling rates may also vary. For example, we used municipal cost data from Japan for this study because the United States and most European countries do not keep such data.

But if these results hold for other developed countries, then society should collectively rethink how to approach recycling.

And

But the substantial environmental benefits outlined above of using recycled materials in production vary substantially across materials. Aluminum and other metals are environmentally costly to mine and prepare for production. Paper, too, is costly to manufacture from raw sources. But glass and plastic appear relatively easy on the environment when manufactured from raw materials.

These differences are vital. Although the optimal overall recycling rate may be only 10%, the composition of that 10% should contain primarily aluminum, other metals and some forms of paper, notably cardboard and other source of fiber. Optimal recycling rates for these materials may be near 100% while optimal rates of recycling plastic and glass might be zero. To encourage this outcome, a substantial subsidy offered only on those materials whose life cycles generate positive environmental benefits should be applied.

The article illustrates once again that whether we are talking tax cuts, living wages, rent control, tariffs, or recycling, good intentions unsupported by empirical evidence can be counterproductive.

Last night, the president said there are 94 million people "out of the labor force" needing a job. No.

The number of people wanting a job is about 14 million people.

Let us do the math:

US Population = 330 million

Population age 16 and older = 254 million (non-institutionalized)

Adult population in the labor force = 160 million (7.6 million unemployed)

Adult population not in the labor force = 94 million (254-160=94)

Adult population wanting a job but not looking = 6 million (aprox.)

Adult population not wanting and not looking for a job = 88 million

Adult population wanting a job, looking or not = 14 million (aprox.)

Who are the 88 million adults not wanting and not looking for a job? Some examples:

High school students ages 16-18

College students

Stay at home parents

Adult caregivers

Retired people

Disabled people

The president said 1 in 5 working prime working age adults (25-54) are not working. Well, yes. This includes:

Stay at home parents

Adult caregivers

Disabled persons

People who retired early

Older adults who have gone back to school

The unemployment rate for this age segment is 4.1%, which means 1 in 25 people who want a job and are actively looking for a one are “not working.”

The number of people without a job and wanting one, whether they are looking or not, is about 14 million people. Trump overstates the problem by nearly seven-fold. (94/14=6.7) He has been called on this repeatedly, yet he continues to repeat a faulty number that would flunk a high school economics student. One of two things is true. A) He is incredibly ignorant of the most basic of economic concepts and is unwilling to listen to correction, or B) he is being willfully and cynically deceitful. (Some of his mistakes can likely be attributed to off-the-cuff remarks that, while inaccurate and unwise, may just be mistakes. This issue has been raised multiple times.) Neither bodes well for becoming a swap-draining renewal president.

Jan 25, 2017

What Globalisation is, and whether it is in any way new, are the focus of intense debate. I discuss this debate in Chapter I, since much else hangs upon it. Yet the facts of the matter are actually quite clear. Globalisation is restructuring the ways in which we live, and in a very profound manner. It is led from the west, bears the strong imprint of American political and economic power, and is highly uneven in its consequences. But globalisation is not just the dominance of the West over the rest; it affects the United States as it does other countries.

Globalisation also influences everyday life as much as it does events happening on a world scale. That is why this book includes an extended discussion of sexuality, marriage and the family. In most parts of the world, women are staking claim to greater autonomy than in the past and are entering the labour force in large numbers. Such aspects of globalisation are at least as important as those happening in the global-market place. They contribute to the stresses and strains affecting traditional ways of life and cultures in most regions of the world. The traditional family is under threat, is changing, and will change much further. Other traditions, such as those concerned with religion, are also experiencing major transformations. Fundamentalism originates from a world of crumbling traditions.

The battleground of the twenty-first century will pit fundamentalism against cosmopolitan tolerance. In a globalising world, where information and images are routinely transmitted across the globe, we are all regularly in contact with others who think differently, and live differently, from ourselves. Cosmopolitans welcome and embrace this cultural complexity. Fundamentalists find it disturbing and dangerous. Whether in the areas of religion, ethnic identity or nationalism, they rake refuge in a renewed and purified tradition – and, quite often, violence.

We can legitimately hope that a cosmopolitan outlook will win out. Tolerance of culture diversity and democracy are closely connected, and democracy is currently spreading world-wide. Globalisation lies behind the expansion of democracy. At the same time, paradoxically, it exposes the limits of democratic structures which are most familiar, namely the structures of parliamentary democracy. We need to further democratize existing institutions, and to do so in ways that respond to the demands of the global age. We shall never be able to become the master of our own history, but we can and must find ways of bringing our runaway world to heel. (3-5)

This short collection of essays has stuck with me ever since I first read it years ago. As I have reflected on the American political scene of the past two years, the insights of this book have become ever more prescient. I see the rise of Trump nationalism as a reactionary response to globalization. (This is not conservatism vs progressivism as we have recently understood them.) It is the death throes of the 20th Century world order. It may be short-lived. It may last a generation. But I suspect that it is ultimately doomed. Over the long-haul, globalization is an inescapable dynamic. However, that does not mean that great harm to human well-being and to the planet will not happen during these death throes.

Since at least the 18th Century, we have seen an unprecedented improvement in human well-being, accelerating through the 19th Century down to the present, spreading around the world. But we should not forget that this improvement was punctuated by a retreat from globalization, resulting in two destructive world wars bracketing a global depression. One hundred years from now, I suspect global human well-being will have made substantial strides over our present living standards. I think globalization is virtually inevitable because we have amassed enough information and experience to see that a globalized world, for all its present vagaries and challenges, is the path to mutual common good. What is much less clear is what happens in the short term. I suspect that this is the biggest turning point in world that most of us now living will ever experience.

Jan 20, 2017

What are the economic merits of Free Trade Coffee? In this video, my friend Victor Claar (professor of economics at Henderson State University) gives a 25 minute presentation about the economics of fair trade. It was originally given at the Macmillan's EconEd Conference last year. The audience is economics teachers but the presentation is accessible to a laypeople. His advice at the end of the video is mine as well. Claar also published a monograph on the topic Fair Trade? Its Prospects as a Poverty Solution.

Dec 23, 2016

It is easy to become obsessed with challenges and threats we see before us today. It is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and to see the tremendous good that is happening in the world. Here are six social indicators pointing to improving quality of life for billions around the globe. Setbacks and momentary reversals are certain but increasingly the challenges we face are of our own making; like tribalism and authoritarianism. Let us be vigilant in addressing the challenges we face without losing sight of the bigger picture.

Dec 14, 2016

"Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty- five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

We tend to view our era as a time of unprecedented change while assuming the world before our birth was virtually stagnate. In fact, rapid radical change has been the norm for at least the past few centuries. The case can be made that the generations living just prior to our generation experienced changes every bit as disorienting as ours.

Early in the nation's history, most travel was by water. We built cities on major waterways. Most states in the eastern half of the United States have a major river or the ocean as a boundary. This meant that each state had access to the water transportation super highway. Travel by land was exceedingly difficult. There were few roads. It took days to reach even nearby cities by stagecoach and each night meant fees for food and lodging that were not part of the stagecoach price. You had the labor of a driver spread across a few people. The cost of travel for even short distances could consume a week or more of wages for a typical working person. Only the wealthy and merchants could afford such travel.

I believe it was Pred who said travel from New York to Pittsburgh did not typically take a route across Pennsylvania. It involved boarding a boat in New York, sailing down the east coast around Florida to New Orleans, and then navigating up the Mississippi and the Ohio to Pittsburgh. Boats could handle far more people per trip, required no extra lodging expenses, food was generally provided on board, and laborers per person was much smaller. Water travel was far also more energy efficient and thus less costly.

As turnpikes and canals were built, and with the advent of the steamboat in the 1820s, travel times shrank and so did the prices. Depending on travel destinations, Pred shows the cost of travel per mile between 1800 and 1840 dropped by 50-90%. Railroads shrank distance and dropped costs even more. Today, we can fly from New York to Los Angeles in a few hours for one or two day's wages for someone earning around the US median Salary.

The world continues to change in significant ways but let us not fool ourselves into thinking that our age is the first to encounter sweeping technological and economic changes.

Dec 12, 2016

For most Americans living today, there has been a presumption that our children's lives will be more prosperous than own. The American Dream, whatever particularities might include, has always included this assumption. It is virtually a social contract. Is the idea that most of our children will have a more prosperous life than we did really valid?

Robert Gordon, economic historian at Northwestern University, released a book earlier this year, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War. Gordon's mammoth tome documents changes in the American standard of living over the past 150 years. His research leads him to conclude that not all innovations are equally significant in improving living standards. During the period from 1870-1970, a wave of technological and social innovation emerged that radically improved worker productivity, and therefore improved our standards of living. There has been innovation since 1970 but most of it, apart from communication and entertainment, has been an extension and a deepening of the innovations that occurred prior to 1970. The period from 1870 to about 1920 was a period of development and implementation of innovations that began to have full impact after 1920. Gordon estimates the average annual growth rate in output per hour like this:

1890-1920 = 1.50%

1920-1970 = 2.82%

1970-2014 = 1.62%

For those familiar with American history, you will remember that income inequality was quite high going into the 1920s. Inequality shrank steadily and substantially over the next fifty years, until the mid-1970s. This corresponds with Gordon's estimates of rapidly improving worker productivity. Since the 1970s, there has been slower growth and the growth is more related to capital investment than to improving worker productivity. We have seen income inequality grow since the 1970s.

Gordon is doubtful that we will ever again have a convergence of innovation like we had from 1870-1970. This, combined with certain demographic headwinds, will make sustainable high growth improbable for present generations. I hope to write more about this in coming days but this graphic posted by William Easterly on Twitter caught me eye. It comes from an article by David Leonhardt, The American Dream, Quantified at Last. I take it as more evidence consistent with Gordon's thesis.

Nov 19, 2016

“Increasing mobility has left us uprooted and disconnected from communities in America.” This is a common refrain going back at least 100 years. Think of the song following World War I that asked how are you going to keep them down on the farm once they have seen gay Paree’? The lament of increasing mobility is a compelling narrative except for one minor problem: Mobility has been declining for decades.

Sociologist Claude Fischer writes:

The evidence that mobility has declined is more robust for roughly the past 65 years, thanks to annual census-bureau mass surveys. Around 1950, about 20 per cent of Americans changed homes from one year to the next. In the 1980s, under 18 per cent did. By the 2000s, under 15 per cent – and now we are approaching annual moving rates of only 10 per cent. About two-thirds of movers do not go far, relocating within the same county, and the frequency of such local moves has dropped by about half since the Second World War. The proportion of Americans who move across county and state lines is considerably lower, but that rate, too, has dropped substantially, from about 6.5 per cent in the 1950s to under 4 per cent now.

So what is the cause? My best guess is that the greatest single factor in the great settling down was the increasing physical and economic security of US life.

Thanks to a growing and stabilising economy, spreading affluence, vastly improved public health, the establishment of government institutions from policing to business regulation, and all sorts of ‘safety net’ programmes over several generations – from Social Security to federal disaster assistance – fewer and fewer Americans have been forced to move because of unemployment, floods, the death of a breadwinner, and so on. Greater security also helps account for an apparent shift from the 19th to 20th centuries in who was likeliest to move.

I have done extensive work on tracing my ancestors. I have traced every line back to at least my third great grandparents, most of who were born in the early 1800s. I know more about some than others but the part that has always intrigued me is how much they moved. I would estimate that the majority lived in at least three different states and in more than five counties over their lifetimes. I suspect most people who have identified American ancestors this far back have similar stories. But I have also noticed one anomaly.

My great grandmother, Augusta (Holmes) Kruse was born in Dekalb County, Missouri, in 1870, the year after her parents had moved there from Plymouth, Massachusetts. Her ancestors go back to seven of the Mayflower passengers and include many other people who arrived shortly thereafter. Her family had stayed in place for nearly 250 years. Her maternal grandfather, Ebenezer Pierce, was seaman who owned ships and sailed the world. Her mother had been to finishing school in Boston. Her grandfather Holmes was an accomplished carpenter. These were not exceptionally wealthy people but they clearly had stable comfortable lives. Her parents moved west because of her father’s health. Augusta married my great grandfather, Carl P. Kruse, who had emigrated from a small town in Denmark where his family had lived for generations and where his father had served in the Danish Parliament. Because of the population explosion in Denmark, farmland was scarce, and wanting to farm, Carl came to America.

Most of my other family lines consist primarily of farmers, miners, and laborers. Ancestors in these families seemed to be constantly on the move. This anecdotal analysis of my family history seems consistent with what the author is describing.

Demographers talk of migration in terms of push and pull factors. Push factors are those that make the status quo more unbearable to maintain. Pull factors are those that promise relatively better circumstance than the status quo. It would appear that in past generations, push factors might have played a bigger role; things like war, drought, local economies gone bad, and the like. However, as America has become more prosperous, there have been fewer pushes pushing fewer of us. Migration is more about positive pulls.

The “settling” of America is one more piece of evidence about an improving world in terms of material well-being. But as the author notes, we still have challenges to social cohesion. While improved transportation and communication may not have made us more inclined to move, it may have reshaped who we choose to interact with in our communities. And as the global economy reshapes the work we do, the trauma of regional job loss is possibly made more traumatic because we are less and less accustomed to uprooting and relocating. Focusing on increasing mobility as a cause of rootlessness takes us in an unproductive direction.

Nov 17, 2016

Nov 01, 2016

Question. When it comes to breathing, do you prefer inhaling or exhaling?

I have asked this question many times and it always elicits a chuckle. Clearly if you choose one over the other, you end up dead. And if your body decided that this ongoing struggle between inhaling and exhaling was a problem to solved, you would end up dead. Breathing is not a problem to be solved. It is a polarity to be managed.

Polarity management has a much wider application then biology. It applies to a wide range of features in human systems. Economist John McMillian (Stanford) wrote an insightful book called, “Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets.” McMillian makes the case that the never-ending struggle in political economy has been to find the right mix of centralization and decentralization. If power becomes too centralized, then it will become oppressive and destructive. Yet, without centralized power, local tyrants emerge, injustice proliferates, and warring factions square off, sending society into chaos. In this sense, political economy is a polarity to be managed, not a problem to be solved.

Writing in the Atlantic, Eric Liu makes an important observation (emphasis mine):

"We don’t need fewer arguments today; we need less stupid ones.

The arguments in American politics today are stupid in many ways: They’re stuck in a decaying two-party institutional framework; they fail to challenge foundational assumptions about capitalism or government; they center on symbolic proxy skirmishes instead of naming the underlying change; they focus excessively on style and surface.

Americans can do better. Remember: America doesn’t just have arguments; America is an argument—between Federalist and Anti-Federalist world views, strong national government and local control, liberty and equality, individual rights and collective responsibility, color-blindness and color-consciousness, Pluribus and Unum.

The point of civic life in this country is not to avoid such tensions. Nor is it for one side to achieve “final” victory. It is for us all to wrestle perpetually with these differences, to fashion hybrid solutions that work for the times until they don’t, and then to start again.

"America is an Argument." Bingo! I think you will find the same is true in all human structures, including church and family. Part of what facilitates better discussion and arguments is appreciating that we are often wrestling more with polarities and less with virtue and vice.

Oct 29, 2016

The Kruse Kronicle byline is, “Contemplating the intersection of work, the global economy, and Christian Mission.” While politics is not the primary focus of this blog, it is impossible to escape how this presidential election is reshaping Christian Mission for substantial segments of American Christianity. In short, we are asking how ought our discipleship shape our political participation?

Before you read further, you should know that I have opposed Donald Trump since he announced back his campaign in June of 2015. My take on policy and priorities leans center right, which should make me lean toward Republicans. While I have considerable policy disagreements with Trump, that it is not what drives my opposition. My conviction stems from being a disciple of Jesus Christ.

“Why would anyone vote for a Mormon (non-Christian) candidate [McMullin] while citing the immaturity of Trump's (maturing) Christian faith as a reason not to vote for him?”

I used the occasion of that question to unpack my views. Some friends have encouraged me to post this response in a more accessible forum. So here it is with some light editing and a couple of additional comments.

Response

I think the question [quoted above] misunderstands the issue for Christian Never Trumpers. Having no standing to speak on behalf of them as a group, I’ll speak for myself.

My primary concern is not about who wins this election, what happens to the Supreme Court, and so on. My concern is the witness of the Church. We are called to be ambassadors for the coming reign of God, to exhibit love and compassion, to speak up about injustice. We are resident-aliens in this world, not full citizens. Highlighting the intensity of that commitment, Jesus says in Luke 14:26 that the Kingdom even takes precedence over family ties. Ties that compromise that witness are idolatry.

There are no perfect candidates unless Jesus is on the ballot. Every candidate will have shortcomings. We are not looking for perfection. A candidate need not be Christian. The question is about general moral character, not the candidate’s specific religious doctrinal beliefs. The Church stays independent, whoever is elected, lifting up that which is good and offering critique for that which is not, but first and foremost living as a community that exhibits the marks of the Kingdom.

As each of us votes, we must make a determination about which of the candidates, if any, offers sufficient merit to receive our vote. Some conservative voters see Clinton as unacceptable. Fine. Let’s take her off the table. This being the case, some feel they must vote for Trump. Fine. I think that is misguided, but let’s grant that.

The issue is not that someone might vote for Trump. The issue is the attempt by the Christian Right to characterize Trump as basically a good guy, a baby Christian, basically "one of us," who is just a little rough around the edges. Trump is not a little rough around the edges.

Have you read Art of the Deal? Have you watched his life unfold? At the core of Trump’s life is the very antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount. He brags that never needs to apologize or repent about anything. [His recent apology about leaked videotapes was noteworthy for its novelty but also for NOT being an apology to the people he had wronged. It was to the voters who have the power to withhold something he wants.] He has been the apostle for win at all costs. You don’t just defeat opponents. You destroy and humiliate anyone who gets in your way. He advocated seducing the wives of rivals to humiliate them and bragged about having done so himself. He made his fortune exploiting human frailty in the area of gambling. You are unflinchingly loyal to him or you are an absolute loser. I can go on. Everything about him exudes an unstable vindictive predatory character. His “unfortunate” statements are not the product of an unpolished public figure. They are the product of a calculating, manipulative, pathological personality.

Democracy runs on the basis that there are competing views in society. When someone wins an election, the loser concedes and the winner leaves the loser standing, the loser living to fight another day. It is the understanding that no victory or loss is ever final, that keeps society moving along, even with disagreement. Trump routinely demonstrates he cannot tolerate the presence of opposition, period! Not even from beauty queens. From the beginning of the campaign to present, it has all been about what HE is going to do. By sheer force of his personality and will, and without any clear understanding of the basics of governance and a demonstrated unwillingness to learn them, he is going to fix everything. This is World Wrestling Entertainment bravado, not leadership. This grandiosity, coupled with a vindictive predatory temperament, is the recipe for authoritarianism.

Too many Christian Right Trumpers are not simply voting for the lesser of two evils. They are serving as his apologists, legitimizing his profound evils. It is an act of hypocrisy, considering all the criticism leveled at the moral failings of candidates in the past. When it is their agenda that is at stake, all concern about character goes out the window. You think Trump is the better candidate? Fine. But do not insult us with minimizing who this man is.

[As one Facebook friend posted: "You cannot support Ahab because you think he is somehow better than Jezebel and call it righteous."--Dennis Bills]

Let’s assume that by not voting for Trump, a Clinton presidency leads to some very unfriendly policies toward Christian Right people. So be it! The Church’s mission is not to win elections but to give witness to the coming Kingdom. That witness can be given through martyrdom if need be. Christ does not need the help of hateful authoritarian demagogues to achieve his purposes.

I am not that familiar with McMullin. From what I hear to date, he seems to be a principled man with admirable ethical standards, wanting to build a more civil society with aspiration and persuasion. To the degree that turns out to be true, he is a welcomed refreshing voice. I don’t care what his specific doctrines are.

Final Thoughts

In the end, I am sure I was not persuasive. For many on the Christian Right, this election is visceral. Social psychologists write about “motivated perception,” where what we see gets shaped by what we feel is at stake. For so many, legitimate or not, Hillary Clinton is the embodiment of the “other side” in the culture wars of the past forty years. The idea of letting her win, much less vote for her, is nihilistic and apocalyptic. One is forced to choose between letting loose the apocalypse or voting for a candidate who is the antithesis to all you have previously advocated as morally necessary.

The motivation to legitimize and rationalize Trump is powerful. According to survey research comparing 2011 to 2016, White Evangelical Protestants went from being the religious segment least likely to believe that someone who commits immoral acts in private life can govern ethically (2011 = 30%) to the most likely (2016 = 71%). (Source) Jeff Jacoby compares statements by leaders before 2011 with statements after in his piece How the religious right embraced Trump and lost its moral authority. When holding a moral standard means substantial loss, they embraced moral relativity, the cardinal sin of “secular-progressives” they so despise. Again, my point is not that someone will vote for Trump. My concern is that those who decide they will vote for Trump should not minimize and trivialize who the man shows himself to be.

In closing, I will say that our present circumstances in the American Church are not purely the problem of the Christian Right. Across the political spectrum, much of American Church is not formed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. A great many progressive Christians have concluded that the answer to the Christian Right is the emergence of the Christian Left. They participate in the same hyperbolic “othering” that the Right has done and call it “prophetic” and “social justice advocacy.” And what we learn now is that when you have for years embraced characterizations of your opponents as wanting to kill women, equating them to holocaust deniers, and declared them to be functionally no different than the Taliban, you lose the words to name genuine authoritarianism when it appears. (See Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump) The answer is not a more progressive church. The answer is a loving community of resident-aliens, seeking the welfare of the city, seeking truth no matter the implications for our host culture’s political agendas. Right, left, or whatever, precious little of the American Church owns that vision.

Sep 14, 2016

One of the most persistent worries about population and economic growth is that we will eventually use up all our resources and land. It is based on the intuitive (but false) assumption that if it takes X acreage of land to feed a person today, then it will take 2 times X acreage to feed double the population in the future. This thinking does not allow for ongoing innovation and adaptation.

Look at this graph showing total global hectares being used in farm production from 1960-2009. Note that the global population grew from 3 billion in 1960, to 6.8 billion in 2009.

The population will likely grow again by half over the next fifty years. Note that the projections are for the number of hectares used for farming to actually decline. The alternative projection assumes we adopt more efficient food consumption and stop growing crops for fuel. In either case, we will be using significantly less land than we did in 1960.

This is one example of decoupling, where two seemingly connected trends become disconnected. We are seeing this in water consumption, CO2 produced per dollar of produced goods, and with the amount of natural resources we use. The direst predictions about resources and climate tend to minimize or ignore these decoupling developments. We should not allow dire predictions that ignore decoupling to frighten us away from growth and achieving prosperity for the whole world.

Jul 28, 2016

Anthropogenic driven climate change is a fact. As the climate changes, the poorest of humanity will suffer the greatest. The most ardent climate activists tell us this is settled science. So settled that to question these conclusions puts you in a league with people who deny the Jewish Holocaust ever happened. It is science!

Well, there is another issue around which there is even more scientific consensus. Megan Molteni, writing for UnDark:

According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 88 percent of scientists believe these foods are safe to eat. Only 37 percent of the general public agrees. Republicans and Democrats are just as likely to be opposed to transgenic foods, as are people across different age groups. So why is it that we trust the National Academy of Sciences and the WHO when they say climate change is likely caused by humans, but not when they say these foods are safe?

Molteni highlights the recent development of goats modified to include an antimicrobial enzyme that helps human’s fight off bacterial cells that cause diarrhea and other infections. The milk from these goats aid children in fighting off these diseases.

According to the World Health Organization, 525,000 children under five died last year from diarrheal diseases, mostly in poor communities in developing nations where waterborne diseases are rampant and vaccines and antibiotic treatments are difficult to acquire and distribute.

The modified goats could reduce the suffering, even death, of millions of children. They were developed by a public university and have had nearly two nearly decades of testing and review. The goats could be distributed via whatever strategy seems most effective, even free. There is no sinister corporate entity lurking in the shadows. So why are the goats not in use?

First, regulation. Clearly GMOs must be evaluated and regulated but the present regulatory system is such a mishmash of regulation and entities that it is very costly and time-consuming to get approval. Consequently, the process is skewed toward large corporate entities who can work the system, provoking many anti-GMOers to make the regulatory process even more of a barrier.

Second, anti-GMOers have organized to oppose all GMO usage in developing nations, at times pitting well-funded European and American activists against poor agricultural workers who could benefit greatly from the technology.

But as scientists will tell you, “GMO” tells you zero about the merits of any particular product. What tells you about the merits is looking at the actual merits of the product!

Last month, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report assessing all the science available on genetically engineered crops. It concluded that we shouldn’t be making generalizations about GMOs, but rather asking if a particular crop or GE product makes the world a better place or a more dangerous one, on a case-by-case basis. This was not exactly what people wanted to hear, the authors wrote: “We received impassioned requests to give the public a simple, general, authoritative answer about GE crops. Given the complexity of GE issues, we did not see that as appropriate.”

The goats are not the only product caught up in this controversy. The linked article suggests others. In addition to nutrition and health, GMOs also have a role to play in adapting to warmer temperatures, with crops that grow more food with less water and fewer nutrients, for example.

… improving food security and public health without harming the environment will require the concerted use of many methods, from traditional breeding to organic farming. Genetic modification can’t hold back rising sea levels or fill aquifers drained by years of drought. But there are important contributions to be made with problems that have been unsolvable by other means, the researchers say — if only regulations would allow it.

Climate activists routinely moralize about people who will not get on board with their initiatives, saying deniers are accountable for countless lives that will one day be diminished, even lost, due to our inaction on climate change. The poorest folks will suffer most. This is their scientific conclusion. Yet when the same scientific community says GMO technology is safe, with the potential to save millions of lives in the here and now, while enhancing the welfare of countless others, the activists rise up in opposition to the technology. What this tells me is that while there are some people who are genuinely knowledgeable about the science of climate change and are alarmed about the consequences, the concern by multitudes is less about science and far more to do with subjective narratives with which science (happily for them) agrees. When the “naturalist” narrative is not supported, they disregard science instead of modifying their narrative.

I’d invite to read all of Molteni’s article, Spilled Milk. In the meantime, my climate activist friends, unless you are willing to give full-throated support of GMOs here and now, do not let me ever again here you decry the “anti-science” climate deniers. You are no different. Subjective considerations drive you every bit as much as climate deniers. Right here and right now, people are suffering and dying because of your “anti-science” behavior.

May 19, 2016

Life expectancy at birth is one of the single best indicators of societal well-being. So many things have to work well for the great majority of people to live long lives that the high life expectancy serves as proxy for holistic well-being. The measure is of particular value in that it measures something relatively concrete, as opposed to income (which has varying impacts relative to local living standards and exchange rates) or happiness (a highly subjective term.)

Throughout human history, global life expectancy at birth was about 30 years. This does not mean that everyone died before age thirty. It is an average age of death. One in four children died before their first birthday (it is less than 1% in developed nations today). Some people lived to be quite old. But on average people lived to be thirty.

Over the past two hundred years, something has changed. Global life expectancy at birth has more than doubled and it is still improving. I won't give a dissertation on why that might be but rather invite you to realize that contrary to our intuitions, news reports, and personal biases, we are living through the most astonishing improvement in human flourishing in human history.

Here is a chart showing the trend.

This chart offers an animated presentation of the improvement by nation.

Apr 25, 2016

Bloomberg had an excellent piece by science journalist Faye Flam, titled It's an Outrage! See? Look How Outraged I Am! Her lead is "Science is starting to shed some light on the curiously continuous cycle of moral outrages." Expressions of collective outrage are not particularly new but it does seem to me the frequency of expressed outrage, and outrage over more and more trivial events, has increased. Why? Psychologists offer this thought:

Psychologists say it all starts to make sense if you think of outrage as a form of display. Expressing it advertises a person’s views and allegiances to potential allies. And the more popular a victim's cause, the less risky it is to join in displaying your umbrage.

So is the outrage disingenuous?

Psychologist Jillian Jordan, who led the Yale experiment, said she wasn't trying to suggest that people were faking outrage for the purpose of looking good. She believes people genuinely feel the outrage. The point was to explain the urge to share it so ostentatiously.

In real-world cases, most people unconsciously tally costs and benefits, said Harvard psychologist Max Krasnow. There is a cost to outrage, in terms of social risk. The cost shrinks when there are more and more people expressing it in solidarity. If you’re the only person lobbing yogurt at the Icelandic Parliament, you might well get arrested. But if you’re part of a teeming mob, your collective display of outrage can lead to the ousting of the prime minister.

So what triggers outrage?

Why do some incidents provoke almost universal outrage and others set off only those in certain age groups or of particular political leanings? One of the most universal sources of outrage is stealing or hoarding resources, said psychologist Eric Pederson. The theory is that this is ingrained in humans because our ancestors' foraging cultures survived by sharing; if Joe helped himself to what others hunted and gathered, but then did not share his good fortune when he found berries or killed a wildebeest, he’d get in deep trouble.

Humanity’s deeply rooted antipathy for cheaters helps explain the outrage over the tax evaders revealed by the Panama Papers. But in other cases, said psychologist Robert Boyd, the definition of what's outrageous is dictated by less objectively obvious cultural norms. Humans are wired to pick up cultural rules and norms, and to aim outrage at violators, he said. Cultural norms vary by political leanings, geography and other factors. Often there’s a large generation gap.

Harvard’s Krasnow said it all comes back to the fact that displays are aimed at potential allies. An outraged person may have no personal tie to a given issue, but outrage can signal sympathy with those who do. This can be quite noble and selfless, not entirely self-serving; the two blur together in ways that allow human civilization to work to the extent that it does.

According to an anthropologist I read, human reason evolved in the context of communal survival. People observed patterns in events around them and developed heuristic models for survival. They fashioned stories to make sense of events and their place in them. Reason developed as a way to reinforce stories and strengthen societal cohesion. Which is also to say, reason that challenged societal stories and cohesion was a threat. We are not naturally wired for objectivity.

It seems to me that expression of outrage serves a similar function. Narrowly, outrage is about calling out destructive behavior, but more broadly, it is about expressing social solidarity. Sometimes it is hard to tell which is the driving motivator.

I have long suspected that the rising waves of outrage may have more and more to do with a need for social solidarity than moral indignation. In a post-modern era, identity is much harder to define and solidify, making us feel more insecure. That insecurity leads us to seek out opportunities for solidarity. Expressing outrage is just such an opportunity, particularly if the offending party/parties are of a "tribe" whom we jointly find disagreeable. The person(s) at the center of the outrage may become completely objectified, serving as a prop in the solidarity building exercise. Exaggerations, misrepresentations, and apocryphal stories will often be added to heighten the outrage and amplify the endorphin-releasing satisfaction that comes from intensely felt "outrage" solidarity.

The problem, of course, is that in our rush to solidarity we can dehumanize others and make poor decisions. Applying a little objectivity will often show a more complex set of circumstances than our outrage will allow. Over the years, I can't possibly recall the number of times I have calmly pointed out some exaggeration or misinformation in a charged conversation. It doesn't matter that I may even be entirely sympathetic with those who are outraged. The reaction is predictable. I am a traitor. I am at least being dismissive of people's suffering. When I point out their is no change in the number police officers killed on duty in the face of claims of increasing murderous violence against police officers because of Black Lives Matter, I am insensitive to police officers. When I point that global extreme-poverty has halved over the past thirty years and global inequality is declining in the face of claims that "neoliberal capitalism" is making the poor poorer and driving up inequality, I am insensitive to people suffering in poverty. Objective input is not welcome because ultimately the conversation is about subjective commitments, not objective discernment.

Flam closes the article with:

“It’s a complicated game we’re playing," Krasnow said, "and sometimes the best strategy is to say nothing.”

I agree but the operative word is "sometimes." How about the other times? How are we to conduct ourselves then? I do not write this as someone who has achieved objectivity and never participates in outrage. Not every expression of outrage is inappropriate. Hardly! And yet, I am self-aware enough to see the dehumanizing, exaggerating, hyperbolic, demon lurking at the edge of consciousness when I am outraged. I am aware of how good it feels to be in solidarity with a tribe who feels my intense outrage. As a Christian, I know discipleship has political consequences but does following Jesus really look like a endless rolling wave of outrage? What does it mean when we are so quick to misrepresent facts and dehumanize our opponents when the one we say we follow said:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors [and the Republicans, and the Democrats, and the ...] doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matt 5:43-48)

It is almost as if Jesus is saying that love should be our solidifying value, not outrage. I do not know. I still working on it. Let me know if you figure it out.

Apr 20, 2016

New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter has an excellent piece about how ideology shapes our embrace/rejection of science. The left loves to harangue about the "anti-science" right when in fact the left participates just as much in the same anti-science behavior, and the left's anti-science behavior is every bit as destructive.

“The left is turning anti-science,” Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape who as a venture capitalist has become one of the most prominent thinkers of Silicon Valley, told me not long ago.

He was reflecting broadly about science and technology. His concerns ranged from liberals’ fear of genetically modified organisms to their mistrust of technology’s displacement of workers in some industries. “San Francisco is an interesting case,” he noted. “The left has become reactionary.”

Still, liberal biases may be most dangerous in the context of climate change, the most significant scientific and technological challenge of our time. For starters, they stand against the only technology with an established track record of generating electricity at scale while emitting virtually no greenhouse gases: nuclear power.

Only 35 percent of Democrats, compared with 60 percent of Republicans, favor building more nuclear power plants, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.

It is the G.O.P. that is closer to the scientific consensus. According to a separate Pew poll of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 65 percent of scientists want more nuclear power too.

He goes on to note:

Research suggests that better scientific knowledge will not be sufficient, on its own, to overcome our biases. Neither will it be mostly about improving education in STEM fields. To defeat our scientific phobias and taboos will require understanding how the findings of science and their consequences fit into the cultural makeup of both liberals and conservatives.

Explaining in more detail:

It is not hard to figure out the biases. People on the right tend to like private businesses, which they see as productive job creators. They mistrust government. It’s not surprising they will play down climate change when it seems to imply a package of policies that curb the actions of the former and give a bigger role to the latter.

On the left, by contrast, people tend to mistrust corporations — especially big ones — as corrupt and destructive. These are the institutions bringing us both nuclear power and genetically modified agriculture.

“When science is aligned with big corporations the left immediately, intuitively perceives the technology as not benefiting the greater good but only benefiting the corporation,” said Matthew Nisbet, an expert on the communication of science at Northeastern University.

So when assessing the risks of different technological options, the left finds the risk of nuclear energy looming the highest, regardless of contrary evidence.

This doesn’t affect only beliefs about climate change and energy policy. The research identified similar distortions in people’s beliefs about the scientific consensus on the consequences of allowing concealed handguns. Biases also color beliefs in what science says and means across a range of other issues.

In the context of climate change, this heuristic presents an odd problem. It suggests that attitudes about climate change have little to do with education and people’s understanding of science.

Fixing it won’t require just better science. Eliminating the roadblocks against taking substantive action against climate change may require somehow dissociating the scientific facts from deeply rooted preferences about the world we want to live in, on both sides of the ideological divide.

And it is the last sentence that is key. How do we do that! It seems to me we have to create spaces for productive conversations. No matter how emotionally satisfying it may be to engage in tribal disdain for those of another tribe for being "anti-science," it is precisely this behavior that entrenches those we may wish to persuade. And the glaring truth is that very very few of us are pro-science. We are pro-ideology and pro-heuristics, and happy to embrace science when it meets these prior concerns. The reality is that there are multiple ways to frame an agenda. So another piece of the puzzle is to enter the mind of opponents and to figure out how to frame concerns in a way that resonates with things they value. But research shows, unsurprisingly, that we nearly always attempt persuasion from the angle that is most persuasive for us, projecting our values on to others. It usually has the effect of driving the opponent in further away.

I think the answer lies with these considerations. I didn't say it was an easy answer. What thoughts do you have?

Mar 18, 2016

Many Americans, especially progressives, are now “socialists.” The rise of Bernie Sanders has had much to do with it. Yet, when I hear them talk, I keep hearing Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

According to Marxian theory, Socialism is a transitional economic system between capitalism and communism. Capitalism (i.e., private property ownership and the distribution of goods and services through market exchange) will run its course and one day a classless society with no private property will evolve. The workers will hold things in common and goods will be distributed according to need.

Some Marxists believed they could accelerate this evolution through violent revolution and imposition of communist principles. We saw that tactic attempted several times in the last century. Others believed economic evolution should run its course. People could work for greater social justice within the system as they methodically brought every aspect of the economy under the control of the government, eventually ending private ownership of the means of production. From there, it would be just a few more steps to the communist utopia. This transitional system is socialism.

Socialists called themselves “social democrats,” or “democratic socialists,” advocating “social democracy.” The emphasis here is democracy. Since communism is the inevitable outcome, there is no need to short circuit the process through violent revolution. People will choose their way into communism.

During the last century, it certainly became clear that relying on markets and philanthropy alone was not an optimal strategy for a just and flourishing society. Government has assumed control of some functions to ensure the broader welfare of citizens in all of today’s capitalist societies. These functions have been “socialized.” But the broader context is still private property and market systems. “Socializing” selected functions is not a tactical progression toward communism. This is welfare capitalism.

However, a funny thing happened to socialism along the way through the last century. It was mugged by reality. It has become clear that socialism is fatally flawed. Market systems provide a real-time feedback loop of information, matching ever-changing demands with an ever-changing supply. Markets empower countless strangers to benefit each other through specialization and exchange. There is simply no way a centralized entity can manage the production of goods and services. Assuming those with the sufficient information could be trusted to have the wisdom and ethical courage to make optimal decisions, the endless churn of supply and demand makes sufficient information utterly impossible. (Other insurmountable barriers exist but that is for another day.) The “inevitable” road to communism was wrong.

Most political parties variously named “democratic socialist” or “social democrats,” have become advocates for expanding welfare capitalism. For precisely this reason, the word “socialist” has fallen out of favor in many regions. So in short, we have learned that neither pure libertarianism nor socialism is workable. We are all welfare-capitalist now: We rely primarily on private ownership and market exchange, and quibble about what societal functions might be better if socialized.

So let us look for a minute a Bernie Sanders, the “socialist” icon for hipster intellectuals. Sanders talks of making America more like Denmark – or the Nordic economic model. Are Nordic countries socialist? Finnish-American journalist, Anu Partanen, author of The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life, recently noted:

The problem is the way Sanders has talked about it [Nordic economic model.] The way he’s embraced the term socialist has reinforced the American misunderstanding that universal social policies always require sacrifice for the good of others, and that such policies are anathema to the entrepreneurial, individualistic American spirit. It’s actually the other way around. For people to support a Nordic-style approach is not an act of altruism but of self-promotion. It’s also the future.

In an age when more and more people are working as entrepreneurs or on short-term projects, and when global competition is requiring all citizens to be better prepared to handle economic turbulence, every nation needs to ensure that its people have the education, health care, and other support structures they need to take risks, start businesses, and build a better future for themselves and for their country. It’s simply a matter of keeping up with the times.

I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. … The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.

Are you getting that? A robust welfare system is a means to a robust market economy! And that raises another issue: markets.

Paraphrasing Partanen, progressive Americans see Nordic social policies as anathema to market capitalism. They argue that allowing corporations to rig the system in the favor of a few, allegedly an inherent feature of capitalism, is social injustice. It makes no sense. If corporations are rigging the system, then it is not truly a market! The socialist answer would be for the government to assume ownership of corporations. If you just want to end inordinate privilege for big-business, then what you are advocating is – wait for it – freer markets!

In reality, there is no such thing as "free markets." Market economies are based on the premise that absent fraud, misinformation, and externalities, people will make the best and most efficient decisions about what to consume and produce for their own needs, mediated through price information generated by supply and demand. Producers who produce well will be rewarded and those that do not will eventually fold. The reality is that there is always incomplete information and there are nearly always some externalities inherent in trade. Taxes and regulation are also necessary. But generally speaking, trade unencumbered by planners or by gamers of the system leads to higher living standards.

Big-business capitalists use political power to block competition and preserve economic power. They constrain markets. Writing 240 years ago, Adam Smith wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Free markets are the answer to powerful economic players conspiring with government to choke off competition and preserve their privileged status through subsidies, tariffs, and onerous legislation.

Socializing some aspects of society is not antithetical to market economics. We cannot deliver some social goods through markets, or at least not deliver them well. But we must have a robust market economy to generate the tax revenue to make socialized services sustainable. Denmark is the top rated country in the world on business and trade. The other Nordic countries are right behind them. This is not the Sanders model.

Sanders wants to institute protectionist policies, raise taxes on corporations (USA is already on the high side), set a minimum wage 50% higher than other developed countries, and do a host of other trade unfriendly measures. Meanwhile, taxes for all but the wealthiest will stay low (taxes in Nordic countries are high for everyone.) He wants to expand the safety net golden egg while strangling off the goose that lays it. He thrives on populist anti-market and anti-business sentiment. Curiously, Clinton is probably closer to the Nordic model, embracing an expanded and smarter welfare model, while championing (at least in the past) trade and business. Yet she dismisses Denmark as contrary to this vision. Partanen speculates Clinton knows her plans are more genuinely like Denmark than are Sanders’ but she avoids association with the Nordic model because of public misconceptions. I think that is true.

So why are so many supposedly well-educated people now calling themselves socialists? One big reason is surely economic illiteracy. Going back to at least the 1930s, conservatives warned of “socialism” with the advent of Social Security. Same with Great Society programs in the 1960s - now also with ACA and talk of single-payer healthcare. To some degree, left-leaners just decided to own the moniker. Simultaneously, enough libertarian-leaning folks falsely used free markets to rationalize away ANY government involvement in anything; so many lefties just owned this misconception of “free market.” What they want is a more robust version of welfare capitalism and less big-business domination. Economic illiteracy is my generous reading of why people call themselves socialist. But I have a less generous reading as well.

Partanen writes:

Americans are not wrong to abhor the specters of socialism and big government. In fact, as a proud Finn, I often like to remind my American friends that my countrymen in Finland fought two brutal wars against the Soviet Union to preserve Finland’s freedom and independence against socialism. No one wants to live in a society that doesn’t support individual liberty, entrepreneurship, and open markets. But the truth is that free-market capitalism and universal social policies go well together—this isn’t about big government, it’s about smart government. …

Like the Finns, countless Americans fought to keep America free from the totalitarian ideologies that emerged in the last century. They largely won. They considered it a legacy to pass to future generations of America and to the world. Rightfully so. So why would people seeking a more robust welfare state and less big-business domination call themselves socialists?

Inigo Montoya is wrong with regard to many of the new “socialists.” They know exactly what the word means! They know the emotion it stirs. The misuse is intentional. Calling yourself “socialist” is the left’s version of Trumpist politics: Stir up tribal rivalry with incendiary language. Raise a verbal middle finger to your opponents. When they call you on it, roll your eyes with incredulity that people would accuse you of advocating totalitarianism. “After all, we just want to improve the safety net end reign in corporate greed like any good social democrat.” So to my “socialist” friends who cannot fathom the origins of anger in Trump voters, part of the answer is staring at you in the mirror. Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.

If your sole concern is fomenting tribal political battles, then the above is mostly irrelevant to you. Calling yourself a socialist is effective for your purposes. If you care about clarifying the truth in pursuit of a greater good for humanity, then you will use language that is faithful to what is being described. Whether through illiteracy or insolence, “socialism” fails that standard. You really need to stop using that word.

The world is becoming a better place. It is not utopia. We are not without substantial challenges. But we are becoming (as in movement along a trajectory) better (as in measurably improved according to a standard.)

The Human Development Index is a United Nations measure of well-being combing data about income, literacy, education, and life expectancy. Here is the index for the nations of the world in 1980 and then in 2012. The reality is that we are living through the most astonishing transformation toward human well-being in all of history. You can find the interactive version of the chart at Our Data.

Mar 01, 2016

Are you smarter than a chimp? When it comes to knowledge about global socioeconomic trends, there is a good chance you are not. For years, Swedish global health expert, Hans Rosling, has been giving Ted talks and making presentations about global trends. One his favorite teaching tools is to ask people a question like this:

Globally, over the past 20 years, the rate extreme poverty has:

Doubled.

Stayed the same.

Decreased by more than half.

Now chimps will select at random, giving a 33% chance of each answer. Yet when Rosling asks audiences, at least half will say A, a sizable percentage will say B, while a few will say C. Yet C is the correct answer! This is the case on one variable after another. Audiences routinely score worse than chimps, choosing the most negative option.

As an old adage has it, "It isn't what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know that ain't so." That we routinely pick the wrong answer more often than chimps shows that we clearly we have bias.

In the Ted talk, How not to be ignorant about the world, Hans' son Rosling notes that part of the problem is our education system. Teachers go to college at a particular point in time and learn the state of the world at that time. But they tend not to learn about ongoing developments. The data has often been hard to come by and hard to interpret. So teachers are biased by what they learned years ago. (Reporter have the same problem.) But there are other factors.

During our evolutionary history, our brains became wired to notice threats. Hunters walking through the brush who were attentive to the possibility of tigers lying in wait, likely survived those who went about carelessly enjoying a beautiful day. So when we reflect on broad human trends, we are disposed to fixate on perceived threats. What was useful for us in the wild, is counter-productive for us as we try to interpret socioeconomic trends. If you want to outscore a chimp on an exam about global well-being, Ola Rosling suggests that you must drop your predispositions and adopt these four rules of thumb:

1. Assume most things are improving. 2. Assume most people are in the middle of a distribution, not a binary of rich and poor. 3. Assume social development precedes becoming wealthy. (Don’t assume that a population must be rich before meeting basic social needs.) 4. Assume you are exaggerating the threat if the topic is something about which you personally have great fear.

Additionally, Hans, Ola, and others have been working to build the Gapminder website to provide you with data that can be presented in meaningful ways. But one of the most important contributions the Roslings have made is their collection of entertaining and informative videos. In this post I am including every video I can find with a brief annotation. (I'll add more as I find any.) Many of the videos overlap or cover similar data but they are all well worth viewing. So here is your resource for becoming smarter than a chimp. Don't say I never gave you anything.

(This link also has links to most of these videos including some shorts not listed here: Gapminder Video)

Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes (2010)

If you are just getting acquainted with Rosling, I'd begin here. This 4 minute presentation gives you a quick sense of what he is talking about.

Hans and Ola Rosling: How not to be ignorant about the world. TED June 2014

This is the second video to watch. The front half is Hans making his case that the world is improving and the back half is Ola explaining, as I recounted above, why are so disinclined to see positive change.

Hans Rosling: The magic washing machine. TED December 2010

This is the third one to watch. This one of my favorites. While fully embracing the concern about environmental impacts of economic growth, Rosling shows the importance of economic growth through the story of the washing machine.

THE REST ARE IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

Hans Rosling: The best stats you've ever seen. TED February 2006

The TED presentation that kicked it all off. He focuses on the positive changes underway in world and points to his efforts to liberate, integrate, and animate data, and to find ways to present data the public finds understandable.

Hans Rosling: New Insights on Poverty. TED March 2007

Rosling shows that social development tends to precede economic development. He addresses the issue that unfortunately to date, economic development has always been based on fossil fuels. Higher yields, technology, and markets are key to ending poverty but there are more dimensions that need our attention like human rights, environment, governance, economic growth, education, health, and culture. The ending has a great surprise!

Rosling shows that countries that have developed from poverty to well-being have done so at far faster rates that Western nations did. Poor countries today can make the transition much quicker because of what previous countries have learned.

Feb 23, 2016

Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling are truly brilliant and entertaining. The first part of this video highlights how poorly we assess what is happening in the world. The back half gives some simple tips on how to avoid developing false perceptions and suggests why it is important that we do so. Enjoy!

Jan 21, 2016

Once again, Oxfam is circulating their statistic that 62 people have as much wealth at the bottom half of the world’s population. Think about that for a moment. When you read that, what do you think that means? Particularly, what is wealth?

Many people will interpret “wealth” as financial assets. Many others realize wealth includes the value of our non-financial possessions. Therefore, Oxfam is saying that if you add up the value of all our possessions, 62 people own half. Right? Wrong! Though that is the message they want you to hear.

Terminology lesson. The sum of your financial assets and your non-financial possessions is your total assets. Wealth is your total assets minus your debt. Wealth is your net worth. Oxfam misconstrues wealth as total assets. (And as this has been thoroughly documented in the press for years now, we can only assume the misrepresentation is intentional.)

Thanks to Reuters reporter Felix Salmon, who dug into Oxfam’s sources, we know Oxfam uses Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook to calculate their numbers. Here is how it works (using the 2015 Databook):

Step 3: Calculate the amount of wealth for the bottom half. Multiply $263 trillion by .07%. That gives $1.84 trillion.

Step 4: Get a list of the wealthiest people in the world and then add them up until you get to $1.84 trillion.

That may seem right at first glance but look at this graph from Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report 2015. (p. 15) It shows what percentage of each decile lives in which region of the world. I’ve added two notations.

Note that the United States has 10% of the world’s least wealthy people (circle 1). China has none of them (circle 2)! How is that possible? Because the bottom number for wealth at he left side of the chart is not zero. It is a negative number. The middle class American with a mortgage, student loans, and consumer debt totaling more than the value of her home, bank account, and other possessions, is less “wealthy” than a Chinese peasant farmer who owns virtually nothing but also has no debt. The entrepreneur who borrowed a million dollars for his business is even “poorer” than these two. This is who Oxfam is grouping together in its bottom 50% of wealth. It is a meaningless comparison. But the deception does not stop there.

Oxfam builds a narrative that the increasing concentration of wealth at the top has the corresponding negative effect of making people poorer at the bottom. Their misrepresentation of wealth as total assets gives us no insight into this claim. I will suggest that for the poorest people in the world, income is a more critical issue than wealth or total assets. One must have an income that at least meets basic needs before she can begin to save, invest, and buy capital goods.

Extreme poverty, measured by income, is rapidly disappearing. The percentage of people living on less than $1.90 per day has shrunk from almost 40% in 1990, to less than 10% today (and we have added an extra 2 billion people.)

Furthermore, the global distribution of income has been progressively moving toward a bell curve distribution and away from a bi-modal distribution, with wealthy people clustered at the top and very low income people clustered at the bottom.

And this chart shows hows the mean and median global per capita income numbers keep rising, also noting that the global GINI coefficient declined from 68.7 to 64.9 between 2003 and 2013. (Lower GINI number means more equality.)

To me, this chart suggests that recent trends in technology and globalization have benefited billions of people who once lived in bare subsistence poverty. There is a small minority of people at the left of the chart who are not being touched by these changes, most of them living in counties with turmoil and failed nation-states. At the extreme right are the owners of capital who have benefited from productivity and expanded trade. Middle class people in developed nations have experienced downward pressure on their wages due to technology and from a burgeoning supply of labor in a global economy. However, living standards are not just a function of wages but also the cost of living. A case can be made that the developed world middle class had improvements in living standards because globalization kept the cost of living lower than it otherwise would have been. That does not show up in this chart. It is more complex than this but I think a chart like this is a better place to begin a discussion.

In short, Oxfam wants to promote a narrative that casts global capitalism primarily as an exploitative enterprise, a zero-sum game where the growth of wealth at the top necessarily means the reduction of wealth at the bottom. The narrative intuitively makes sense. Some version of this thinking is common but it is virtual gospel on the left where the moral compass is directed predominately by equalization rather a robust conceptualization of justice. But it is wrong. It is every bit as ideologically myopic as the "free markets and democracy fixes everything" mantra on the right.

Finally, let me be clear about what I did not say. I did not say I thought that the growing concentration of wealth at the top was good, that there are not masses of people who need substantial improvement in their economic well-being, that global capitalism is an unqualified good, or that there are not profound economic injustices in the world. I did not speak to any of Oxfam's proposed policy solutions. Discernment on economic issues is complex and requires our best efforts at sound analysis if we want to be bring lasting and just change. Oxfam's misuse of the data to support ideologically predetermined policy's does not help. They are telling the truth about the numbers they use, knowing the numbers they use will lead most of us. That is what I'm addressing.

The progressives believed, first and foremost, in the importance of science and scientific experts in guiding the economy, government, and society. Against the selfishness, disorder, corruption, ignorance, conflict and wastefulness of free markets or mass democracy, they advanced the ideal of disinterested, public-spirited social control by well-educated elites. The progressives were technocrats who, Leonard observes, “agreed that expert public administrators do not merely serve the common good, they also identify the common good.” Schools of public administration, including the one that since 1948 has borne Woodrow Wilson’s name, still enshrine that conviction.

Later, she writes:

Advocates similarly didn’t deny that imposing a minimum wage might throw some people out of work. That wasn’t a bug; it was a feature -- a way to deter undesirable workers and keep them out of the marketplace and ideally out of the country. Progressives feared that, faced with competition from blacks, Jews, Chinese, or other immigrants, native-stock workingmen would try to keep up living standards by having fewer kids and sending their wives to work. Voilà: “race suicide.” Better to let a minimum wage identify inferior workers, who might be shunted into institutions and sterilized, thereby improving the breed in future generations. ...

... Clark’s theory is now a foundation of mainstream labor economics. In his day, however, it was highly unpopular. “A key element of resistance,” writes Leonard, “was that many progressives were reluctant to treat wages as a price,” rather than a right of citizenship and social standing. Informed by their beliefs in scientific racism, most progressives preferred wages to favor some groups over others: men over women, whites over blacks, and most prominently, native stock over immigrants.

Although they generally assumed black inferiority, progressives outside the South didn’t worry much about the “Negro question.” They were instead obsessed with the racial, economic, and social threats posed by immigrants. MIT president Francis Amasa Walker called for “protecting the American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe," whom he described in Darwinian language as “representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.”

So restricting immigration was as central to the progressive agenda as regulating railroads. Indeed, in his five-volume History of the American People, Wilson lumped together in one long paragraph the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act as “the first fruits of radical economic changes and the rapid developments of trade, industry, and transportation” -- equal harbingers of the modern administrative state. With a literacy test and ban on most other Asian immigrants enacted in 1917 and national quotas established in 1924, the progressives bequeathed to America the concept of illegal immigration.

The first paragraph is preface for what follows. It relates why I eschew the label "progressive" despite having some sympathies for some aspects of what today's progressives espouse. In my estimation, "progressivism," then and now, contains substantial hubris - believing that through dispassionate logic, science, and a superior moral locus, we are justified in moving heaven and earth to bring about a brave new world. Institutions and practices that have emerged through time as practical ways of making the world work be damned! I believe most change should be modest reform, not revolution. It is in this sense that I would claim the term conservative. We want to conserve the good as we seek improvement. We aren't that smart and we aren't that noble, when it comes to redesigning the world.

The minimum wage piece is particularly interesting. While impacts of minimum wage increases art notoriously complex and difficult to summarize with precision, most economists agree that substantial increases in the minimum wage dampen job growth overtime. There are studies that show, just as the early progressives logically surmised, that increased minimum wages have a negative impact on the employment of minorities, particularly young black men.

Nov 30, 2015

It’s the end of the world as we know it – because the world is getting remarkably better! Almost every indicator of human well-being shows improvement on a global basis. We live in the best era in human history. How does that make you feel? Like the old REM song, does it make you feel fine? Or does it maybe make you feel incredulous? Defensive? Offended?

I’ve been writing and linking stories about global improvements on social media for at least ten years. I’ve learned that if I point to a negative trend, then people usually respond with somber acknowledgement of a problem. But if I mention a positive trend, I routinely get push back. I get everything from personal anecdotal evidence to accusations of callousness toward those who continue to suffer from some particular problem. This becomes particularly true if there is a strong political agenda connected with a trend. Conservatives don’t want to hear that crime is in steady decline. Progressives don’t want to hear there is a steady decline in church arson, race motivated or otherwise.

Why is it so hard for us to see and accept that the overall state of the world is improving? A recent article at Slate documents once again the improving state of our world, The World Is Not Falling Apart: Never mind the headlines. We’ve never lived in such peaceful times. (Now I know that it is because the article is from Slate that my conservative readers already have their defenses up. When the exact same information gets presented by groups like CATO, progressives go into the same mode. That is yet another feature of the problem.) The data is interesting and well worth the read but it is the following four paragraphs that I think are particularly insightful. It goes a long way to explaining why it’s the end of the world as we know it and we don’t feel fine.

How can we get a less hyperbolic assessment of the state of the world? Certainly not from daily journalism. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a reporter saying to the camera, “Here we are, live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as violence has not vanished from the world, there will always be enough incidents to fill the evening news. And since the human mind estimates probability by the ease with which it can recall examples, newsreaders will always perceive that they live in dangerous times. All the more so when billions of smartphones turn a fifth of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

We also have to avoid being fooled by randomness. Cohen laments the “annexations, beheadings, [and] pestilence” of the past year, but surely this collection of calamities is a mere coincidence. Entropy, pathogens, and human folly are a backdrop to life, and it is statistically certain that the lurking disasters will not space themselves evenly in time but will frequently overlap. To read significance into these clusters is to succumb to primitive thinking, a world of evil eyes and cosmic conspiracies.

The only sound way to appraise the state of the world is to count. How many violent acts has the world seen compared with the number of opportunities? And is that number going up or down? As Bill Clinton likes to say, “Follow the trend lines, not the headlines.” We will see that the trend lines are more encouraging than a news junkie would guess.

To be sure, adding up corpses and comparing the tallies across different times and places can seem callous, as if it minimized the tragedy of the victims in less violent decades and regions. But a quantitative mindset is in fact the morally enlightened one. It treats every human life as having equal value, rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of violence and thereby implement the measures that are most likely to reduce it. Let’s examine the major categories in turn.

3. The nature of employment will change. For the rest of your employees, gig work will grow. ...

4. Winners will win bigger, and the rest will fight harder for the remains. ... McKinsey Global Institute puts it: "tech and tech-enabled firms destroy more value for incumbents than they create for themselves."

5. Corporations will have shorter lives. The average life span of companies in the S&P 500 has already fallen from 61 years in 1958 to 20 years today. It will fall further.

Oct 21, 2015

This chart comes from Timothy Taylor's post The Shifting World Distribution of Income. One notable thing I saw was that median annual income (measured in purchasing power parity dollars) doubled from 2003 to 2013. This chart suggests it will double again within about 20 years. Of course, the most obvious change is the collapse of the spike in at the low end of chart, indicating the rapid decline in the number of people living in or near extreme poverty. See Taylor's post for more details.

Oct 20, 2015

Denmark became a central topic during the Democrats' debate last week. Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist. Hillary Clinton loves Denmark but is dismissive of the idea that America can be Denmark. This inspired a number of articles by various commentators about the truth behind Denmark economic model (or the Nordic model more generally.) Progressives like the high taxes, low inequality, and high government spending. Conservatives counter by noting that the Nordic countries rank among the countries highest in free trade and low corporate taxes. I've been linking articles on Facebook but I thought this piece in Niskanen was the best. Double-Edged Denmark

Right-leaning arguments about the free-market marvel that is Denmark cut both ways. Denmark shows us that a much larger public sector and a much more robust social-insurance system need not come at the expense of a dynamic market economy. In other words, Denmark shows us that capitalism and a large welfare state are perfectly compatible and possibly complementary.

The lesson Bernie Sanders needs to learn is that you cannot finance a Danish-style welfare state without free markets and large tax increases on the middle class. If you want Danish levels of social spending, you need Danish middle-class tax rates and a relatively unfettered capitalist economy. The fact that he’s unwilling to come out in favor of either half of the Danish formula for a viable social-democratic welfare state is the best evidence that Bernie Sanders is not actually very interested in what it takes to make social democracy work. The great irony of post-1989 political economy is that capitalism has proven itself the most reliable means to socialist ends. Bernie seems not to have gotten the memo. But Bernie Sanders isn’t the only one failing to come to terms with the implications of Danish social-democratic capitalism.

The lesson free-marketeers need to learn is that Denmark may be beating the U.S. in terms of economic freedom because it’s easier to get people to buy in to capitalism when they’re well-insured against its downside risks. That’s the flipside irony of free-market “socialism. ...

... the reason the U.S. is lagging so far behind big-government Denmark on free trade, corporate taxation, ease of doing business, and more may very well be that the American safety net isn’t good enough, and economic insecurity at the bottom and middle makes free-market policies a tough sell to anxious American voters.

I don’t know that this is true. But, then again, libertarians and free-market conservatives don’t know that it’s not. Mostly, ideological American capitalists really badly want to believe it’s not true that we’re falling behind Denmark as capitalists because we’re not redistributive enough. (I mean, the previous paragraph made me feel like I was channeling E.J. Dionne, which was … unsettling. But let us put away childish things.) Because if it is true, and social insurance and capitalism are complementary in this way, then champions of economic liberty will be forced to face up to the possibility that attacking the welfare state undermines support for laissez faire economic policy. Some of us might even be forced to choose between our love of capitalism and dislike of the welfare state. Awkward. ..."

Economic development always includes, in some broad sense, an embrace of trade and freedom from arbitrary interference in market activity. Yet when you look at the various nations that rose to affluence in the last century, diverse paths were taken to get there. The particular path toward trade and freedom seems not to be as important as is the issue of stability. When the various players in the economy and society behave in predictable patterns, they are better able to predict and coordinate their behavior, even if the patterns are not optimal in terms of trade and freedom. Imposition of trade and freedom that generates too much instability may be worse than simply staying with less effective economic models in the short-run and letting things evolve.

This need for security and stability is a piece that is frequently undervalued by most libertarians at both the macro and micro levels. Economic historians will tell you that one of the pivotal developments in history (among several) was the emergence of limited liability. People could pool their resources and form joint ventures without putting their entire assets at risk. Bad choices or unforeseen developments would not leave you destitute.

If the aim is a dynamic risk-taking economy leading to high productivity and economic growth, then we need security and stability for citizens. With a basic safety net in place (here I’m thinking mostly of a guaranteed minimum income as opposed to our wasteful welfare industry), people would become less risk-averse, knowing that trying new stuff doesn’t lead to destitution if you fail.

But if libertarian conservatives are blind to issues of security, then progressives are blind to productivity and economic growth. Take the living wage debate. It is said that Walmart’s low wages are possible because we taxpayers subsidize the workers through the welfare system. Nonsense. Welfare support drives up wages. If the wages aren’t at least comparable to welfare options, then why work?

Furthermore, while each business should have the aim of helping their employees flourish (improving their skills and providing opportunity to gain more responsibility in a safe environment), businesses are neither benefactors nor aid agencies. They are the institutions responsible for transforming matter, energy, and data from less useful forms to more useful forms on a sustainable basis. Sustainability means creating more value than the value of resources being used. Wages artificially set above the economic value contributed by labor are unfavorable to productivity and sustainability.

I know of no country, including the Nordic countries, who presume that every job in every circumstance should provide a “livable” income “unsubsidized” by government. Minimum wage is a temporary introductory wage people earn as they develop skills and experience. Few earn it for more than a period of few months. Excessively high introductory wages compels businesses to adapt in ways that reduce the amount of this labor they use, and decrease the opportunities for the least-skilled to find an on-ramp into the economy.

So while precisely replicating the Danish or Nordic model in a large diverse nation like the United States may not be feasible, there are lessons here. To the degree the Nordic models have worked, they have done so because they have successfully married security and growth. This is a managed polarity for them, much like breathing embraces both inhaling and exhaling. In America, our partisan factions each grasp one pole of the polarity and demonize the other. To the degree either succeeds, we are in deep trouble. That is the lesson I learn from double-edged Denmark.

Oct 12, 2015

Angus Deaton has dug into obscure data to explore a range of problems: The scope of poverty in India. How poor countries treat young girls. The link between income inequality and economic growth.

The Princeton University economist's research has raised doubts about sweeping solutions to poverty and about the effectiveness of aid programs. And on Monday, it earned him the Nobel prize in economics. ...

... He also hit upon what the Nobel committee called an ingenious way to discover whether families in poor countries spent less to care for daughters than for sons. Among other things, he studied how much households spent on "adult" items, such as beer and cigarettes, to see whether families consumed things differently depending on the sex of newborn children.

His surprising conclusion: They didn't.

Another Deaton study challenged the once-popular notion that malnutrition caused poverty by making people too weak to find work. He found the relationship worked the other way: Being poor caused people to be malnourished. ...

... The headline goal, of cutting the proportion of people living in poverty in half, was achieved five years early, in 2010, by which time a billion people had left absolute poverty. And now the rate of poverty has fallen to less than a third of its 1990 level (that is, from 47 per cent of the world’s people to 14 per cent).

The other MDGs saw impressive outcomes. The percentage of malnourished people has been cut in half. So has the number of children dying before the age of five, and the percentage of people without access to clean drinking water. The maternal mortality rate has almost dropped by half. The number of primary-age children out of school fell from 100 million to 57 million; the primary enrollment rate in sub-Saharan Africa rose to 80 per cent from 52 per cent. New HIV infections annually fell from 3.5 million in 2000 to 2.1 million in 2013. ...

... There’s a problem with all the self-congratulation, though: Nobody has been able to find any connection between those impressive outcomes and anything done by the UN since 2000.

Charles Kenny and Andy Sumner of Washington’s Center for Global Development have spent the decade tracking the progress of the UN’s goals. In a series of studies, they’ve found that in most areas the goals had little or nothing to do with the outcomes. ...

... What did cause the world to improve so dramatically between 2000 and 2015? In large part, two things: After 1990, the old closed, nationalist economies of the postcolonial era and the Cold War broke down (with ugly results at first) and gave rise to the set of phenomena we call “globalization.” And after 2000, countries in Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and much of Africa started developing better institutions of government, education and health. Stronger liberal economies and stronger states worked wonders.

The UN’s new post-2015 goals at least recognize that economic growth is crucial (they call for an astonishing 7-per-cent growth a year in the poorest countries). It may, in fact, be the only key factor – and it’s the one the UN can’t control.

In fact, what is needed is a healthy economic ecosystem grounded in efficient and just soci0-economic structures, with markets providing a real-time feedback loop through which a society can be adaptive to ever changing priorities. That ecosystem needs to be justly connected to the larger ecosystem of global productivity and exchange.

There is a common tendency to believe that development can be achieved through top down analysis, planning, and implementation. This is generally the U.N. Millennium Development Goals model. Such projects rarely effective. It presumes that experts can correctly identify the most critical needs, that the priority of those needs will stay constant, and that they can identify which levers to flip to get the optimal outcome.

Mohammad Yunus uses the image of the Bonsai tree to illustrate the problem. The tiny Bonsai tree grows from the same seed as the tall tree in forest. The difference is that the Bonsai tree has only the nutrients of the tiny pot in which to grow. The poor are Bonsai people. They are capable of growing as strong and tall as anyone else if planted in the right soil. The right soil is healthy socioeconomic structures and inclusion in networks of productivity and exchange.

The U.N. approach has elements of paternalism. The poor are quite capable of addressing their own needs if the"right soil" is present. Because of geopolitical concerns or pure ineptness, the West has too often played a role in "degrading the soil." This article reminds us once again how impotent so many of our "big idea" solutions are. The critical factors lie in the less than glamorous work of building healthy institutions.

Oct 03, 2015

The SATtalks begin next week in Kansas City, October 8-10. What are they about? They are about Mission 3.0:

Like many others in the world, the church is realizing it is no longer enough to simply “do good.” The good to help others must rise above relief and intentionally lead to Sustainability and Transformation (SAT) or else it fosters ongoing dependence. SATtalks provides a space for important conversations about doing Sustainable Good.

SATtalks is a groundbreaking event designed to provide a new, much-needed forum to highlight strategies and best practices that are working in the exploration and development of more sustainable ways of doing good. Through a proven peer-learning environment, SATtalks is helping faith-based organizations and churches, accelerating the learning curve for all.

Go to the SATtalks website to see links to presentations from last year's inaugural event. Look at the list of presenters. It is good stuff! I'll be there. You should consider attending as well.

Sep 29, 2015

This video is funny and disturbing at the same time. Good intentions, stereotypes, and warm fuzzies can be destructive. Thinking with an economic lens that evaluates actual outcomes is essential. Yet, attempts to bring such a lens to the conversation is usually met with strong resistance. It feels so right, how could it be wrong? As I've said over and over - We need to do mission with warm hearts and cool heads. We need to think and observe, not just emote and respond.

Sep 24, 2015

"The legendary statistical showman Professor Hans Rosling returns with a feast of facts and figures as he examines the extraordinary target the world commits to this week - to eradicate extreme poverty worldwide. In the week the United Nations presents its new goals for global development, Don't Panic - How to End Poverty in 15 Years looks at the number one goal for the world: eradicating, for the first time in human history, what is called extreme poverty - the condition of almost a billion people, currently measured as those living on less than $1.25 a day.

Rosling uses holographic projection technology to wield his iconic bubble graphs and income mountains to present an upbeat assessment of our ability to achieve that goal by 2030. Eye-opening, funny and data-packed performances make Rosling one of the world's most sought-after and influential speakers. He brings to life the global challenge, interweaving powerful statistics with dramatic human stories from Africa and Asia. In Malawi, the rains have failed as Dunstar and Jenet harvest their maize. How many hunger months will they face when it runs out? In Cambodia, Srey Mao is about to give birth to twins but one is upside-down. She's had to borrow money to pay the medical bills. Might this happy event throw her family back into extreme poverty?

The data show that recent global progress is "the greatest story of our time - possibly the greatest story in all of human history". Hans concludes by showing why eradicating extreme poverty quickly will be easier than slowly.

Don't Panic - How To End Poverty In 15 Years follows Rosling's previous award-winning BBC productions Don't Panic - The Truth About Population and The Joy Of Stats."

Sep 16, 2015

Bob Lupton has an excellent piece on how most orphans in Haiti are in fact children who have been unwillingly abandoned because their parents are without the means to care for them. Yet faith-based "orphanages" market these children as orphans. He concludes:

"There are still many true orphans in Haiti whose parents have died or disappeared. Good orphanages are certainly needed as are good adopting families. The Corrigan’s have adopted two of these orphans themselves.

But something is quite wrong when the prevailing non-profit orphanage system – mostly faith-based – “creates” orphans by mislabeling them and markets them as abandoned, yet does little to correct the underlying problem that forces their parents to give them up. It is a classic case of rightly motivated people rushing in to rescue the perishing, establishing emergency ministries that do in fact save lives, but failing to shift to empowerment strategies as the crisis becomes chronic.

When poverty becomes an industry supported by misinformed donors that enables professional workers to maintain a western lifestyle under the guise of alleviating poverty even as they perpetuate dependency, that industry must be challenged. Shelley and Clay Corrigan are doing just that. And in the most productive, self-sustaining, family-strengthening way."

Amen!!! Pope John Paul II defined poverty as exclusion from networks productivity and exchange. The answer is inclusion. In short, economic development. But understand that if you champion economic development you are going to be outside most the church. Much of the church will will reject you because to them, compassion=relief aid. It is grounded in how it makes you feel with no critical thinking about the collective impact. The progressive wing of the church will mostly ignore you, except to occasionally denounce you in the name of social justice as promoting "neoliberal economics," exploitative global capitalism, and having supplanted God with economics. The poor of the world deserve more from us.

Sep 10, 2015

"In his upcoming October cover story, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores how mass incarceration has affected African American families. "There's a long history in this country of dealing with problems in the African American community through the criminal justice system," he says in this animated interview. "The enduring view of African Americans in this country is as a race of people who are prone to criminality." You can read the full story on September 15, 2015."

Aug 18, 2015

... In the paper, we identify several intuitions that may affect people’s perception of GMOs.Psychological essentialism, for instance, makes us think of DNA as an organism’s “essence” - an unobservable and immutable core that causes the organism’s behaviour and development and determines its identity. As such, when a gene is transferred between two distantly related species, people are likely to believe that this process will cause characteristics typical of the source organism to emerge in the recipient. For example, in an opinion survey in the United States, more than half of respondents said that a tomato modified with fish DNA would taste like fish (of course, it would not).

Essentialism clearly plays a role in public attitudes towards GMOs. People are typically more opposed to GM applications that involve the transfer of DNA between two different species (“transgenic”) than within the same species (“cisgenic”). Anti-GMO organizations, such as NGOs, exploit these intuitions by publishing images of tomatoes with fish tails or by telling the public that companies modify corn with scorpion DNA to make crispier cereals.

Intuitions about purposes and intentions also have an impact on people’s thinking about GMOs. They render us vulnerable to the idea that purely natural phenomena exist or happen for a purpose that is intended by some agent. These assumptions are part and parcel of religious beliefs, but in secular environments they lead people to regard nature as a beneficial process or entity that secures our wellbeing and that humans shouldn’t meddle with. In the context of opposition to GMOs, genetic modification is deemed “unnatural” and biotechnologists are accused of “playing God”. The popular term “Frankenfood” captures what is at stake: by going against the will of nature in an act of hubris, we are bound to bring enormous disaster upon ourselves.

Disgust also affects people’s attitudes towards GMOs. The emotion probably evolved, at least in part, as a pathogen avoidance mechanism, preventing the body from consuming or touching harmful substances. We feel repelled by things that possibly contain or indicate the presence of pathogens such as bodily fluids, rotten meat, and maggots. This would explain why disgust operates on a hair trigger: it is better to forego an edible meal under the misguided assumption that it is contaminated, than to consume sickening, or even lethal, food that is erroneously thought to be safe. Hence, disgust can be elicited by completely innocuous food. ...

... The impact of intuitions and emotions on people’s understanding of, and attitudes towards, GMOs has important implications for science education and communication. Because the mind is prone to distorting or rejecting scientific information in favour of more intuitive beliefs, simply transmitting the facts will not necessarily persuade people of the safety, or benefits, of GMOs, especially if people have been subjected to emotive, anti-GMO propaganda.

In the long run, education starting from a young age and specifically targeted at tackling common misconceptions might immunize the population against unsubstantiated anti-GMO messages. Other concerns can be addressed and discussed in the wider context of agricultural practices and the place of science and technology in society. However, for now, the best way to turn the tide and generate a more positive public response to GMOs is to play into people’s intuitions as well. For instance, emphasizing the benefits of current and future GM applications — improved soil structures because herbicide resistant crops require less or no tilling, higher income for farmers in developing countries, reduced vitamin A deficiency, virus and drought resistance, to name a few — might constitute the most effective approach to changing people’s minds. Given the benefits and promises of GM technology, such a change is much needed.

This is one of the most insightful articles I've read on the topic. I think his advice in the last paragraph is particularly important and needs to be heeded when dealing with any number of unjustified oppositions to factual realities - from climate change, to vaccinations, to nuclear power. Yet our propensity is to just shout the facts louder and to use opposition to the facts as a rallying cry for our tribe versus the "anti-science" dolts from the other tribe.

"The country has been arguing about a lot of fundamental things lately including state roles and individual liberty," Woodard, a Maine native who won the 2012 George Polk Award for investigative reporting, told Business Insider.

"[But] in order to have any productive conversation on these issues," he added, "you need to know where you come from. Once you know where you are coming from it will help move the conversation forward."

Aug 03, 2015

... For the Brookings Institution, Frey explains that white populations accounted for just 9 percent of the population growth of the suburbs (in the 100 largest metro areas) between 2000 and 2010. The Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings just launched a fascinating map that shows where white cities and suburbs gained and lost populations. It shows that some metro areas are already breaking from the population pattern that has fueled the last half-century of growth: white losses in cities, white gains in suburbs."